Animal cruelty: People are strange ...

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot. ~Mark Twain, What Is Man, 1906

This weekend started with wonderful weather. Even Friday was lovely, a bit windy, but didn't stop me from buzzing around the garden with my spade, and just enjoying that wonderful scent of early blooming apricot trees and other plants. Saturday gardening also contributed to my backache, especially cleaning the pond and preparing it for the new season.

I was gonna write a post about it all today, but some bad news made me lose the will to do anything apart from stare into nowhere and wonder just how twisted and evil some people can be. I wasn't even gonna write about it but it has made me so sad and upset. I was reading the news and then spotted something that horrified me. Two dogs chained to the railroad tracks and beheaded by train. I couldn't believe my eyes. The dogs were tied with a swing set type chain with one end tied around the dog's neck and the other end secured to the track. In the morning the local kids found both dogs beheaded. This is one of the sickest things I have seen or heard of and I am just in awe of how wicked and rotten someone needs to be to do this kind of barbarity. What is more, it happened few streets away from me. I didn't know whose dogs, but it didn't hurt any less. Then my neighbour told me it happened nearby the apartment buildings a few blocks away and the dogs belonged to a woman who lived in one of them apartments. I was shocked, as my friend lives there, with her two dogs that she and her ex-husband adopted from the rescue center. Then I read the news update and realized it was their dogs Nera and Luna that were killed on the railroad tracks. The photos accompanied the text. I recognized Luna's collar on the photo. I had played with them just the other day. And they were as loving, faithful and grateful as any other dog saved from the streets. I can't possibly imagine what their owners must be going through now, as these dogs were like children to them. I can't even believe what happened, it is so horrifying I keep imaging it's just a bad dream. How could someone do this? How could anyone do this? I could never comprehend how people could get to be so evil and perverted in order to do this to any living being, never mind an animal who can't fight back or can't possibly do anything to deserve this kind of death and torture. Was it kids or some twisted psycho? I hope they find out soon for those inhuman 'people' deserve to experience all the highlights of Middle ages torture. The other day I read about a bunch of 10-year-olds pouring gasoline on some poor cat, setting it on fire alive and what is even more shocking, filming all that with their mobile phones to show off to their friends later on. What kind of parents do they have? Or are they just born as monsters? What will they do as adults? I don't wanna take that guess. I just can't understand how somebody could subject an animal to that or any type of death and cruelty. Sometimes I wish I never read the news, and never heard of all the animal cruelty going on behind our back so I could just live oblivious of the fact that this planet is getting more and more brutal. But that still wouldn't change the fact that sadly, and quite disturbingly, animal cruelty IS a daily occurrence around the "developed" world, and that's not even accounting for the vast amount of cruelty inherent in factory farming.

People must have renounced, it seems to me, all natural intelligence to dare to advance that animals are but animated machines.... It appears to me, besides, that [such people] can never have observed with attention the character of animals, not to have distinguished among them the different voices of need, of suffering, of joy, of pain, of love, of anger, and of all their affections. It would be very strange that they should express so well what they could not feel.

~Voltaire, Traité sur la tolerance